


brutal hymn

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Series: life! life! eternity! [5]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:48:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29944719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: Jonny d’Ville is a fucking tornado, and Tim is not sure whether he wants to get carried off to Oz by it, or to just have a house fall on his head and put him out of his misery.
Relationships: Ashes O'Reilly & Gunpowder Tim, Gunpowder Tim & The Toy Soldier (The Mechanisms), Jonny d'Ville/Gunpowder Tim
Series: life! life! eternity! [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2153655
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	brutal hymn

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, we are really down the rabbit hole now, my friends. Includes references to past canonical character death, grief, and inept non-conversations circling concerns about self-harm.

Ashes tells the others “I’ll stay,” and then they do.

This is a surprise because, of all of them, Tim would have said that Ashes is one of the ones who’s the least interested in him as a person. But even if he wants to be obtuse about it, he doesn’t know how to take the way Ashes is settling in beside him as if this is exactly what they came to the party for as anything other than as a sign of concern.

Tim doesn’t want to get into it with all of them there, and he’s also not totally sure what he wants to say yet, so he waits, but when it’s just him and Ashes, he tells them, “You can go, too, you know,” and “I’m not going to do anything, I promise.”

Ashes kicks out their legs, dangling beside Tim’s own over the edge, and says, “Not everything is about you, Powder Keg.”

Tim makes a face at them for the nickname, and they smile so wide Tim can see dimples, even here in the dark. “Too much? But we’ve got to settle on something, just as a warning for the rest of the world. You know, like a public service. No one hears a name like ‘Tim’ and thinks, ‘oh shit, that’s a guy who could go off at any time.’”

…

In the beginning, things pretty much happen in the way you’d expect. Tim is born, he grows, he meets people, he likes some things about the world, he doesn’t like some other things. All of it happens pretty much in the order you’d guess, following a pretty predictable timeline. There are a few anomalies — Delia, for instance, and how she pushes and pushes and _pushes_ at their parents in a way Tim mostly doesn’t understand the point of but also secretly kind of revels in and roots for — but for the most part, Tim’s life unfolds without too many surprises or upsets. And then everything with Bertie happens, and the whole world goes kind of gray for a while.

…

At first, Tim thinks they’re saying “Jess” —

_Hey Jess, what’s with Normcore?_

_He’s not one of them anymore._

_Doesn’t mean he’s one of us, Jess_

— but there’s something about the sounds that doesn’t feel quite right when he parses them like that, like trying to watch a dubbed movie and getting tripped up by the unmatching mouth-shapes as the characters talk. It’s that incongruity, more than anything, that tugs at the gray around the edges of his mind enough that he tunes in to what they’re saying, most of which doesn’t make any sense. That shouldn’t be a surprise — this crowd is widely agreed to be composed largely of stoners — but Tim has a sinking feeling that the slow, viscous way his thoughts try to follow the conversation has more to do with him than with anything they’re saying.

Everyone in their class knows who Jonny d’Ville is, and, just from knowing as much as everyone does, Tim isn’t surprised when Jonny takes control of the conversation. He’s not quite sure what the tension in Jonny’s tone is all about, the confrontational way he’s persisting in talking to Tim, who feels like he’s only half-way there at all. What he can tell is that Jonny is trying to tell him something, with the way he’s talking about — not Jess, Tim is pretty sure neither Jonny nor the sullen one in the hat who Tim is blanking on the name of has been saying “Jess,” but it’s something like that, it’s — TS? Jonny is trying to tell Tim something about TS, who had been unsettlingly cheerful a few minutes ago, appearing at just the right moment to rescue Tim from the fact that, all of the sudden, being in the cafeteria had felt like an insurmountable obstacle.

Jonny has just asked, Tim thinks, if Tim worries about people — worries about who? About his parents, his sister? Tim’s family feels untouchable, most of the time. His parents are very _we are the parents, you are the child_ , and he thinks if anything was wrong with either of them, he wouldn’t know a thing about it for as long as they could hide it from him with any plausibility. And Delia? Delia feels like the obvious choice for worrying about, but she’s like a rocket ship, she’s putting herself all the way out of the stratosphere from Tim, and he thinks he’ll get burned if he gets too close. His friends? Tim doesn’t really have friends, he doesn’t think — just a friendly but faceless, revolving doors of soccer buddies and Bertie, and Bertie — Bertie’s long past worrying about.

“Not much point, is there? Worrying. Things happen when they happen, all you can really do is respond.”

Jonny shoots him a sharp look, and Tim hopes he won’t be asked to explain. Just scraping together those words had felt exhausting, draining. He shoves another lukewarm bite of whatever it is he picked up to eat in the cafeteria into his mouth to ward off any further conversation, and Jonny d’Ville shrugs and turns to his friend, the one in the hat, the one who isn’t TS.

Focus safely off of him, Tim pauses for a moment before shaking himself to try to kick his body back into gear. Chewing, swallowing — these aren’t things he’s used to feeling the effort of. Still, when the bell rings and Tim trails the rest of them inside, he rouses himself to hang back beside TS-or-Jess and ask, “Hey, what were they calling you? TS?”

TS grins back brilliantly, and says, “Yes, I’m the Toy Soldier! You understand.”

Tim is pretty sure he doesn’t, but he thinks back on the JROTC room this morning, and the way the lining up, the drills, the saluting had felt, for the first time, like the most pointless piece of playacting imaginable, and he thinks maybe he feels a little bit of the shape of what the Toy Soldier means.

…

Tim isn’t going to jump. He already wasn’t — that was never the point of coming up here — and now that Ashes is sat beside him, chain-smoking and stargazing like this is a normal night for them, anything inviting Tim might have felt about the dizzying welcome of peering over the edge is gone, too. Plus, he’s pretty sure even if he did jump, the worst that would happen is that he’d break a leg or two. The last part he tells Ashes, not because he minds the silence so much as — he’s not quite sure why. He doesn’t want them to worry, doesn’t want them to feel like they have to sit out the party up here with him, and he knows that even though he’s counting it in the _not going to do anything_ column himself, it’s still kind of a worrying thing to say.

“Only a leg or two?” Ashes asks, and Tim feels a little vindicated. They sound amused and sardonic more than they sound concerned, so he must have gotten the tone right. Ashes _tsk_ s at him, “That’s lucky, since as far as I know you’ve only got the two to break. Wouldn’t want to put yourself into leg-debt.”

“So,” Tim tries again, this time with a little less aimlessness, “I mean — if I was really going to do something, it wouldn’t be here. This’d be a pointless place to jump off of.”

“Unless you wanted to break your legs,” Ashes agrees.

“So, like, you don’t have to babysit me, or anything.”

“That’s good, ‘cause I’m not,” Ashes says. Tim is pretty sure they’re not looking at him on purpose, but it’s hard to tell with Ashes who, as Tim had been thinking earlier, has never seemed all that interested in him. There has been a kind of comfort in it, actually — the casual, easy way Ashes has accepted the way Tim has started hanging around them and all their friends, the last few months, as if he’s been there all along. By his side, Ashes is still talking, saying, “I’m a good babysitter, actually. Bet you didn’t know that. Lots of activities, kids love me.”

They pause there like they’re expecting a response from Tim, so he tries a vague, “Yeah?”

Ashes nods. “Yeah. So my point is, if I was babysitting you, you’d know it,” they say, knocking their shoulder against Tim’s.

…

The first time Jonny tries to kiss Tim, it feels like Tim could fall right into it, it feels like the school halls between third and fourth period and knowing that _asshole_ doesn’t know it’s Tim who’s there behind the locker door as he talks about the accident like it was just a pain in the ass, like — it feels like hearing that familiar laugh in the school halls and remembering Bertie’s laugh, Bertie making sure Tim has his seatbelt on and Tim’s _own_ laughter at Bertie’s worry, feels like lights, and glass, and lights _on_ glass and the crunch of his own knuckles on nasal cartilage and red on his knuckles and red on the gleam of the broken glass and the crash of his own body taking another body down to the floor with the force of his swing, the blur of his own vision. Jonny tries to kiss Tim the first time, and Tim tastes blood even though there isn’t any blood there to taste, so yeah, he runs.

Jonny d’Ville is a fucking tornado, and Tim is not sure whether he wants to get carried off to Oz by it, or to just have a house fall on his head and put him out of his misery.

…

Now that Tim knows TS well enough to know that it is, in fact, TS, he sees it everywhere. It’s in his math class, in both of his alternating lunch periods throughout the week, and in his French class. It even starts showing up for his odd-day second-period study halls, though Tim’s not totally sure it’s been assigned them. It could have been there all along, and just been quiet enough and cut enough classes that Tim had never noticed it before, but it could just as easily have given itself study hall then, just to stick closer to Tim, and glared the instructor down until the fact that it wasn’t on the attendance list was ignored. Tim thinks about feeling perturbed by this possibility, but it’s actually kind of comforting, having TS nearby.

Tim would have thought, before any of this, that it would be like flipping a switch. It was a part of why he’d never stepped out of line before, this feeling of his that once he did something wrong, he’d careen off the path he’d been on his whole life, and he’d never be able to get back on it. Getting a bad grade, getting in trouble in class — he’d used to think that these were the kinds of things he just wouldn’t be able to come back from if he slipped, but these days he doesn’t want to come back, is doing his damndest to fling himself off the track, and the track keeps following him. Tim broke somebody’s nose on school grounds, and sure, the asshole had deserved it, but he still feels like doing so should have meant something more than a few awkward meetings with his parents and various authority figures and a bunch of promises made for him and in front of him with only minimal participation from him.

“It’s ‘cause you’re you, isn’t it?” TS asks brightly, loudly enough that Tim can _see_ the guy sitting in front of him in study hall listening. “Golden boy gone broken, they all feel like you’re their fault. Plus, your mom’s a lawyer and they’re all afraid she’ll counter-sue.”

Tim’s not in JROTC anymore, but that doesn’t exactly feel like a punishment these days, though it does make for a now-anomalous spot in his schedule that’s devoid of TS. It cleaves to his side even harder during study hall as if to make up for it. “How on earth do _you_ know _that_?” he asks it idly, filling a checkerboard pattern into the graph paper of his notebook.

The Toy Soldier follows the motion of his hands, looks down at the pattern, and says, “Very ska,” approvingly before answering, “Well, it’s obvious, mostly. Also Jonny was eavesdropping on the whole thing when you got hauled in to the office the first time.”

“Of course he was.” Tim doesn’t remember much about the after, from that first time, but he does know that when he got in the shower that night, he’d had Jonny d’Ville’s phone number written on the back of his hand, and looking down at it, it hadn’t felt like much of a surprise.

“Of course,” TS agrees. “I’d already staked you out, he was curious. Plus, you know how he likes it when people hit people.”

Tim is trying to decide whether TS just means that it’d invited him to lunch, when it said it had ‘staked him out,’ or whether there was more to it, when Mr. Davies looked up from his desk and asked, “Jessica, do we need to talk about our indoor voices again?”

“Nope!” TS chirrups. “Mr. D., Tim needs a snack to keep his blood sugar up, if we run down to the caf, should we get you a coffee?”

TS is a menace, Tim thinks, smiling, as the man writes them out a hall pass and an excuse not to be back in the room until moments before the bell rings to drop off his coffee.

…

“Loose Cannon?” Ashes tries, before making a wry face and shaking their head. “Nah, that’s not you either, is it? There’s method to your madness, I think.”

Tim leans back, legs still dangling, till he’s lying prone, looking up at the clouds moving over the stars above them. His hand still smarts a little, so he guesses it’s fair that Ashes is still talking about it, but he’s not really in the mood to get into why he’s made yet another enemy, this time over someone saying something shitty about Jonny d’Ville.

Jonny doesn’t need defending, and also maybe didn’t even hear it, the thing that set Tim off. It’s not about that, though, not really. To Ashes, he says, “Not sure I’m as dramatic as all that, either.” 

He would like not to be, anyway. Earlier, as the guy had scrambled away, rubbing at his jaw and calling Tim a _fucking psycho_ , it had been the number of eyes on him, not the smarting in his knuckles or the sinking feeling of _I did it again_ that had him finding a way up here, after.

“Not as big of a splash as a canon ball?” Ashes muses. “Sure, I guess, but we’ve got to get firearms in there somewhere. You’re a bit of a dark horse, though, aren’t you? Pretty quiet until something sets you off.”

That’s fair, Tim thinks — that’s probably been true always, and not just since he became fucked up enough to be worthy of infamous chem-lab-arsonist Ashes O’Reilly’s notice. “I’m vetoing anything to do with bullets or any puns about triggers,” he says, just to head any of that off at the pass.

Ashes doesn’t look like they mind, though, just looks up at the sky thoughtfully and says, “Sure, okay. How about Gunpowder?”

…

Tim thinks his parents probably would have noticed that he’s acquired two kittens sooner than two weeks after he’s started bringing them in and out of the basement with him every time he leaves the house, except that they’ve acted like they’re almost afraid of him, these last few months. “We just worry,” his mother says, fitfully kissing his temple and trying not to purse her lips as she takes in the leftovers from Raphaella’s latest attempt at giving Tim a makeover, but Tim knows better than to just listen to what she says.

He knows worry, and he knows that what they’re feeling goes beyond it, but it’s mostly not relevant for as long as the way he makes them nervous means they’re not looking to closely at when he comes and goes as the summer wears on. As long as he makes it home for Sunday dinner, doesn’t say anything rude, and doesn’t get brought home by the police, Tim gets the sense that they’re not going to try their luck by asking anything more from him.

But then apparently one of them ventures down into the bathroom off the den in the basement and finds the litter box and bag of cat food, the little food and water dishes Ivy had donated from her ceramics class last semester, and Tim thinks if he doesn’t produce the kittens for context, their minds are going to go somewhere very weird with it, and he doesn’t really have the energy to wade through all of that.

When Tim reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a kitten, his mother gasps. It’s the orange one which Tim has told Ivy in no uncertain terms will definitely _not_ be named Lady Marmalade, and she blinks in the light before burrowing into the crook of Tim’s elbow at the sight of two unfamiliar people.

“I found them,” he explains, and then, “They were alone, no one wanted them.” No need to let anyone think his _troubled behavior_ has evolved into catnapping, after all.

…

Delia shows up for the funeral.

Bertie’s, but Tim doesn’t feel any more present for it than the vacant expression facing out of the open casket.

“Of course I did,” Delia says, hugging him, as if he’s asked her about it. “I left _them_ , not _you_.”

Tim thinks, vaguely, that this is probably a distinction which makes more of a difference in Delia’s mind than it does in Tim’s life, and then she’s reaching up like she’s going to touch the scarring around his eyes and he’s flinching back — an instinctive response, but he doesn’t think he’d have done any different if he’d been thinking about it, and that’s the last thing he can remember about Delia being there until he’s watching her sporty little blue car drive away into the twilight, later.

After, Dad keeps mentioning Delia like the fact that she was there means something, or like he’s trying to get a reaction out of Tim. That’s fine, but Tim thinks they all like to overestimate the impact Delia’s absence has had on him. She’s ten years older, for one thing, and for another, they’ve never been very close, even before she couldn’t stand to be in the room with their parents.

“You always looked up to her so much when you were little,” Dad says, like if he can remind Tim that he used to be a six-year-old, he’ll crack the code to getting an emotional reaction.

“Yeah, and she hated that,” Tim has to say, so he guesses Dad’s tactic worked, at least a little bit.

“That’s just what teenagers are like,” Dad says, like this is something Tim needs explained to him — like he is not, himself, a teenager.

“She says she’ll be home for Christmas, this year,” Dad says, and Tim notes, belatedly, the muted hope in his tone, and okay, Tim’s not a _monster_.

“That’s great, Dad,” he says, trying for a smile.

…

The next time Jonny tries to kiss Tim, Tim’s just hit him.

He’s been tempted, before, but this time isn’t like that, Tim’s not angry. Jonny has a scheme, and that scheme involves really needing to make someone pay but also not being able to afford to be found to be the one to start a fight _again_ — he needs some kind of proof that he’s been provoked. Tim thinks this is the scheme, thinks he’s correct that it’s meant to be some kind of planting of evidence on Jonny’s face. He’s not too invested in understanding the cover story because the truth under the probable initial truth that Jonny does, in fact, want to make exactly the kind of trouble he’s been describing is that Jonny has wanted Tim to hit him for months now, and at least this time he’s asking nicely instead of trying to bait him again.

Tim thinks, vaguely, that this kind of straightforwardness should probably be rewarded.

It’s strange, trying to hit someone when he’s not drowning in adrenaline and displaced rage. There’s something odd and clinical about it, and after he tries it for the first time. Jonny smirks at him, taunts, “Is that really all you’ve got,” and “No wonder you haven’t even managed to get yourself expelled yet, dealing out little love-taps like that.”

It doesn’t work, not if Jonny’s trying to goad him again, but the second blow is better, anyway, now that Tim’s getting used to doing this while feeling like he has conscious control over his hands. Jonny’s face snaps to the side, and he grins, and that’s when he does it, surging forward like a snake, and Tim can almost — almost — taste how this would be something he could want, but it’s not quite there yet, the feeling’s not quite right, so after the first rush of ferocity in the kiss, he pulls back, staying close enough to share breath for a moment, Jonny’s lower lip caught lightly between his teeth, Jonny’s wide-open eyes unnervingly close to Tim’s own eyes staring back.

“There,” Tim finally says, disentangling himself. “Go deal out your wrath on some other poor sucker,” and Jonny smiles like he’s out for blood and turns to go.

…

They like him — they like Tim, the kittens do.

There’s no reason why they shouldn’t — if he knows anything from the old border collie Delia had, growing up, it’s that the way to a pet’s heart is by being the person they know feeds them is the best way to make friends. Still, there’s something a little surprising about it, the way they like to sleep on him or next to him like he isn’t a hundred times their size and capable of rolling over and crushing them in the night.

They also like to climb into his hands and be held when he’s awake, and after a few weeks, when he goes to leave the house without them, sometimes they start to cry, and they’re small enough to fit into his jacket pockets, so he starts to take them out with him.

This isn’t a problem when they’re his secret kittens, but once his parents know they exist, his mother starts to bug him not to take them out of the house, or at least to get collars for them, because, “What if they get lost?”

Tim is pretty sure that’s not going to happen — the kittens like him too much, they don’t like to stray too far from him when he takes them places. He can see, intellectually, how collars might be useful, but the kittens — they’re wild things. Tim has taken them inside, he’s tried to look after them, but putting a mark on them like a collar, like _ownership_ , feels wrong.

…

Tim’s not entirely sure why any of them are at the party, anyway. It’s a house party, the kind you see more in movies than in real life, and almost no one there is someone Ashes would talk to voluntarily, but it’s also Marius’s end-of-year cast party, so the rest of them got an invite.

Tim wouldn’t have guessed, back when he was in a much different section of the school’s social circle, that theater parties would get this wild, but he thinks the theater kid whose house this is has a sibling in college, and it might have turned into a bit of a combined party. None of this explains why Ashes, who doesn’t have a lot of time for what they call _the thronging hordes_ has come at all tonight, and Tim thinks that’s probably most of why they’re sitting up here on the porch roof with him instead of amongst the crowd below.

“Gunpowder’s alright, I guess,” he muses. He has his doubts about whether the nickname will stick, but if anyone can keep saying it with a straight face, it’s probably Ashes.

…

Tim knows him well enough to know that the idea that nothing bothers Jonny is mostly propaganda, but he’s still taken aback, a little, by how affected Jonny seems for a few days after Nastya leaves. He’s not sad, not the way someone else might recognize it, but he’s by turns brooding and manic, and he wants to spend most days in Carmilla’s basement, though he won’t admit that it’s so he’ll be there in case Nastya calls.

She doesn’t, as far as Tim can tell, which he doesn’t think should be much of a surprise, with the way she’s been one-foot-out-the-door all the way through the last few months of school. Still, Carmilla is a pretty hands-off guardian, not to mention that she works nights on a fairly regular basis, and Tim figures it must be strange for Jonny to go from having Nastya around to hang out with most nights to having the house to himself.

Tim has the kittens (more like cats now, but they’re both small, sinuous, and long, like they never quite grew out of that long, adolescent cat-phase) with him, so he’s in no particular rush to get home, so he lets himself take the bait when Jonny starts challenging him to rematches as the others peel off to head home for the night. Sure, most people wouldn’t care enough about the results of a rock-paper-scissors tournament to bother with a rematch, but Ivy and TS have this thing about either unconscious physical cues or psychic vibrations which, in either case mean that if you focus right, you should be able to predict what the other person is going to do when they do it.

Tim is winning, again, because Jonny’s body language and also his psychic vibrations are _really fucking obvious_ , and when Tim slams paper over rock to win for the fifth time running, in the quiet of the now-empty basement, Tim leans forward, and this time, he kisses first.


End file.
